Bibliographic record
Abstract
James S. Olson has had a distinguished career as an American historian, writing or editing books on subjects as diverse as ethnicity, the New Deal, sports, and John Wayne. In his latest book, Bathsheba's Breast, he details the history of breast cancer from antiquity to the present, from the sufferings of Persian queen Atossa in 538 B.C. to Jerri Nielsen's confrontation with cancer at the South Pole in A.D. 1999. Olson's history has much to recommend it—as those who nominated it for a Pulitzer Prize clearly appreciated. Spanning over 2,500 years, the book provides a wealth of information about the history of breast cancer. His discussion of the very early history of breast cancer is particularly impressive, given the dearth of sources from and scholarly studies of those centuries. But, like many histories of cancer—my own included—the book's center of gravity is the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By chapter 3, Olson has introduced the reader to the father of the radical mastectomy, William Stewart Halsted, and the remaining chapters focus on the waxing and waning fortunes of that procedure in the United States. This is not to suggest he ignores the importance of radiotherapy and chemotherapy or the women's and environmental movements; rather, those political, cultural, and medical phenomena are analyzed in terms of their impact on popular and professional views of radical mastectomy. Olson concludes that “a consensus had emerged about treatment” at the end of the 1990s, with Halsted's procedure firmly “moved from surgical texts to history books” (p. 250).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.363 | 0.305 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".